


Sincerest of Flattery

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who (2005), The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: F/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-11
Updated: 2014-11-11
Packaged: 2018-02-24 23:43:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2600711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Missy Master finds a hidden Doctor who has made himself into a human with some rather familiar traits. This is, of course, irresistible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sincerest of Flattery

It is with a certain wry fondness that she watches this particular chameleon of her other half.

Hidden in the shadows (where she does her best work), the Master catalogues the doings, the urges and the needs, of the disguise currently calling itself Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duke of Richelieu and of Fronsac. A good title, yes. First Minister to an early modern king, a silly Earth boy, even better. Ambitious, ruthless, underhanded: well, that’s just charming.

The fondness is a given, but the wryness is all down to the subconscious choices the Doctor seems to have made this time round going into hiding. The colour scheme is gratifying; the textiles--let’s be frank, she can’t wait to get her hands on that textured leather, to feel the heavy cloak run luxuriously through her fingers, to wrap herself up in its red-and-black, just silk against skin. The beard...the beard is simply _funny_. And probably quite fun! 

The overall effect is to leave the Master flattered, entranced, fascinated. So she gets rid of the human trollope already lurking by his side, who could never anyway protect him as she can, to know what he needs and to keep her eye on him. So she watches.

When her moment comes, it is the perfect display to win over this rightfully paranoid man of power. Cloaked, she is an assassin, come to despatch not her Cardinal, but one who would have assassinated him in turn. There is a physical satisfaction in the primitive efficiency of killing with a knife, inserted and left in flesh (almost mess-free). It’s warm killing. She makes sure that he sees the peril, and she makes sure that he sees how easily she makes it go away.

And then she steps out of the dark, ready to fill Richelieu’s void.

As it were.

Her footfall strikes a deliberate note in the seclusion of the vast study; Time Lady vision means that even equally lit, she can still see him better than he can see her. He peers at her hooded figure, suspicious, on guard. Wary, but safe. Barely had time to stir up any anxiety.

“Milady?”

“If you like.” She pushes the hood from her head, letting him see her face. “Mistress is preferable but means much the same.” 

Alarm spills across his features like stars, lighting them up. It’s beautiful, his mouth parted, attention entirely on her. Before he can call for guards, she closes the space between them, a snap of unbreakable elastic.

Time Lady strength means that she can easily subdue him in his human form, but the game is the fun, and the rules of the game (she has decided) are not to press her advantages, not to take what isn’t first converted into an offering. So it suffices to keep him quiet, to discourage intrusions. 

A slender, manicured hand soft over that framed mouth. An intent gaze, eyes never letting his go. His breath is quick and warm on her palm. They stare for a long moment, reading one another, and when the Master judges that he’ll let her play her game, and she withdraws her hand, she finds that water from his exhalation has gathered in the crevices of her lifelines. 

“Who are you?”

“I’m like all your women. I come from nowhere. I don’t exist.” The smile crinkles the corners of her eyes. Oh, but he is precious.

His brow furrows. “And what do you want?”

She sighs just a little--this is reading like a script--but just a little, with the gentle patience of a teacher.

“What do they ever want?”

He begins to rise from his big chair, but she stops him with a firm hand to the shoulder before he can straighten entirely, so that he winds up suspended in space, bent, unwilling to back down but unable to complete the motion. 

“You have power. I have--” she pretends to consider the word, pursing her lips and rolling back her eyes “--talents. That’s the typical arrangement. I believe you can provide me with the rate of exchange?”

She is aware that she has put more on display than usual, buoyed by the infrastructure of corset and custom. She is aware, too, that Richelieu is now looking at the line of her neck, this body’s slim waist, the exposed pale expanse of shoulder, collarbone, sternum. These clothes have made of her a very precise instrument for his seduction, with its suggestion of vulnerability and its illusion of disclosure. 

But he’s not stupid, even like this. He senses the danger, too, not because she, a stranger, has taken him hostage in his own domain, but because it’s obvious the vulnerability is only an illusion, or at least is no hindrance. Her talents are as much demonstrated by the metal in her grip as by the flutter of her eyelashes.

And yet, in spite of the threat, he is more intrigued by the possibilities than he is frightened of the risks, and she likes that. He isn’t scared of her. She releases him, moving to cup the side of his head instead, her fingers curling in his rather tame hair. He reaches for her hip. 

Ah! 

Her tiny gasp is genuine and involuntary. Her eyes widen; his are pale and washed-out in the weak light and absolutely compelling.

“I saved you,” she says in an accusing tone.

“Yes.”

“You’ll use me.”

“I’d like to.”

She smiles, pleased.

She eases him back into the chair and climbs in after him, trapping his thighs in the folds of her skirt and with the pressure of her folded legs. He smells of leather and humans and it’s perverse and she finds herself breathing in deeply, bending her head to the nape of his neck for more, her nose at the crease where high collar ends and skin begins. His tunic creaks as he shifts and strains, and she giggles against his jaw.

Once she collects herself, the Master backs away to work at all the buttons, concentrating as the stiff material resists her fingers. Richelieu’s hands go still around her waist while he watches her work, his expression greedy. She makes her way down until finally she can push the coat away, revealing a dark, pleated shirt underneath, and the strip of chest it doesn’t cover. 

She has to lean back further still in order to get at his laces, and as she does so, perched around his knees, he suddenly tips her all the way back, superior strength useless when she loses her balance. He surges to his feet as she falls, hands still cradling the small of her back, and pins her against his desk, its edge digging in painfully.

He buries his face in her chest, and when he comes up for air it is with a look that is a delicious mixture of menace and lust. 

“Don’t think this makes you safe.” His voice is gritty, making her all but shiver with happiness. “Don’t think I’ll forget how easily you killed that assassin. You might not have gotten your pretty hands dirty, but the blood is there all the same.”

His hands move to the back of her head, not gentle, holding her in place. He kisses her, and then his grip tightens and he pulls away; a hiss of shock. “You taste of blood...or I cannot say what, but…”

The Master raises a sardonic eyebrow. “But it’s familiar? Bit of déjà-vu? Spot of something you shouldn’t know but do? Oh, my dear.”

She wipes her lipstick from the corner of his mouth, rests her thumb on his lower lip. “I knew you would be fun. Now, be a good boy and get it out for your Mistress.”

She takes a moment to gather up all that fabric and tuck the hems like ruffles into the top of the skirt, freeing her to untie her own ribbons and kick her underthings away. He’s hesitated long enough that by the time he has reached for his laces, her attention is once again his, so she gets to watch: It’s all so novel, his human self-delusion, her body, his. 

She squirms against him where he keeps her pinned, his thigh between hers, and then he reaches for her knee and pulls it up behind him, backs off just enough to let her leverage herself onto the desk for a better angle. She has just long enough to wonder whether it would be possible to form the mental connection with this temporarily rewritten version of her Doctor, and decide that it would be too disappointing to try and find out she couldn’t. 

He pushes himself at her, and it’s not the easiest thing, doing this without sharing minds, but with a sense of surprise, she finds that there’s a clarity in only perceiving this experience from one side of it, unechoed. It’s so _physical_ , these sensations of pressure and friction and fullness, and they’re all hers alone. 

She pulls him closer with the lifted leg (and the other, too, for good measure) and her arms around his neck, so that she can kiss him back, her tongue in his mouth mirroring, simulating the reciprocity loop. And maybe she squeezes him a little too tightly around the throat, because his grip hardens bruisingly on her hip, an oversized ring digging into the bone, but his shoulders tense, and she squeezes him inside her.

And she doesn’t come when he does, but she didn’t really expect to, and the devastated look on that face when she releases him is worth not being able to forget that this is Richelieu that she has seduced, Richelieu, not really the Doctor (not like this) that she has taken. 

The Master pats him on the cheek and surveys her work. Dishevelled, debauched, deshabille, oh, destroyed...his little hat is askew and his breeches are a mess. 

She reaches out for the ornate cross he’s still wearing on a long chain, casts her eye idly over the circular script inscribed densely around its bars. 

She pauses as she twirls it along one of its axes, laughs, wry and fond, as though at a joke she’s just read.


End file.
